A corporate environment may include several different kinds of computers utilized by users of all different skill levels. Often, corporations provide technical support to people working in the corporate environment. Such assistance may include support for user-errors and hardware malfunctions.
Generally, due to the large scale of corporations, it is difficult for technical support staff to provide assistance in person, especially if the corporation has offices in different geographic areas, perhaps globally. When dealing with inexperienced users or with a wide variety of computer models and manufacturers which may be running different software, it may be difficult to accurately assess or diagnose the technical problem from a distance, especially if the user is unable to accurately communicate the actions they have taken on the computer to the support staff. Shadowing is a technique employed by support staff to service technical problems. Shadowing is the ability of a third party to connect to a user's session, typically through a server, to monitor the current session and take control of the user session in order to provide assistance.
Different types of problems are commonly encountered in such a setting. The technologies currently available to deal with the above described problems generally have scalability issues. Many companies utilize virtualization or remote access software. Each time a user logs on to a system, they create a virtual session on a server. Currently, when users encounter technical problems, support staff may shadow the user's session by creating another virtual session and communicating between the sessions. A significantly negative impact on the system occurs when the server is not capable of adequately processing user requests due to limited available resources.
Additionally, when certain operating systems and software programs do not have multi-session capabilities, support staff is prevented from shadowing to provide technical assistance using known methods and technologies.